Hot summer nights: Fans of '70s and '80s rock radio will have a hard time finding more hits on a given night than they'll hear on the Soundtrack of Summer 2014 tour. The tour, which kicks off Wednesday in Wichita, Kan., features co-headliners Foreigner and Styx, who first toured together in 2010. "It's been the most fun of any kind of co-headlining tour that we've done, by far," says founding Foreigner guitarist Mick Jones, who co-wrote such classic-rock staples as Cold As Ice, Juke Box Hero and I Want to Know What Love Is with original Foreigner lead vocalist Lou Gramm. The Soundtrack of Summer tour, which also includes former Eagles guitarist Don Felder, will continue through August.

Not the same old song and dance: One of the first people to see Foreigner perform live? Jerome Robbins, the renowned Broadway producer and choreographer, who also co-directed West Side Story. While Foreigner was rehearsing for its first shows, Atlantic Records president Ahmet Ertegun stopped by to check out the young rock band that had signed with his label. "He thought he'd be creative, so he brought Jerome Robbins to see the band, to see if he could come up with any ideas for our stage presentation," says Jones, 69. "The poor guy was just getting blasted with this incredible volume of music."

Fast ride to the top: Foreigner played its first show in April 1977 for a couple hundred people at Washington's American University. Within 12 months, the band was playing for a quarter million at California Jam II. "We were in the studio at the time, finishing up our second album, Double Vision," Jones says. "We had only the 10 songs from the first album and a couple of blues songs we did, 100 Proof's Somebody's Been Sleeping and Betty Wright's Let Me Be Your Love Maker." To flesh out the California Jam set, the band introduced a still-incomplete version of Hot Blooded, which would become the first single from Double Vision. "I think Lou Gramm made up the lyrics, because we hadn't finished them yet."

Opening act: Foreigner supported Ted Nugent, Uriah Heep and the Doobie Brothers in the early days, but Jones just might be the only musician who opened for both The Beatles and Led Zeppelin. Foreigner played 2007's Ahmet Ertegun tribute, which was headlined by a Zeppelin reunion. The gigs with the Fab Four came in 1964, when Jones played guitar for French pop singer Sylvie Vartan. For three weeks, Vartan played right before The Beatles on a nine-act bill at Paris' Olympia Theater. "One night, as the curtain came down, it snagged on my guitar and pulled it down, and me with it, to the ground," Jones says. "I cussed and swore, and John Lennon heard me. He said, 'Hey, we didn't know you were English, lad. Come off and have a drink with the boys afterward.' From that point on, they kind of took me under their wing."

Severe weather alert: In August 1999, while getting ready for a show at an outdoor amphitheater in Salt Lake City, Jones looked out the window of his hotel room and saw a funnel cloud form. "It started to pull everything up into it and move across the valley right to my hotel room," he says. "Everything that was in its way, it just took up and threw everywhere. Concrete slabs went flying." Jones says he watched the twister take off the roof of a nearby building, "I thought, 'This is it.' Amazingly, it just skirted the hotel, but it blew out a bunch of windows. It was unbelievable." Perhaps even more unbelievable: That night's concert went on as scheduled.